


the third night

by alethiometry



Category: Assassin's Creed - All Media Types
Genre: Cunnilingus, F/M, Female Eivor (Assassin's Creed), Light Angst, Pining, Vaginal Fingering, commitment issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-02
Updated: 2021-01-02
Packaged: 2021-03-10 20:27:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,106
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28493121
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alethiometry/pseuds/alethiometry
Summary: Three nights she comes to him, asking of him something he wants so badly to give. Three nights now, and he is forgetting more and more just want it is that has made him so careful, so hesitant now where he had never been before.
Relationships: Eivor/Vili Hemmingson
Comments: 12
Kudos: 76





	the third night

**Author's Note:**

> Happy New Year! I started writing this in the last moments of 2020 because I guess I decided I wanted to spent my first moments of 2021 in horny jail. Ubisoft really loves to tease me with these goddamn battle couples and I'm mad about it... at least we can fuck him this time I guess.
> 
> Spoilers for The Tale of Two Jarls (Snotinghamscire arc).
> 
> Enjoy!

Eivor tastes of cloudberries stolen from the woods beyond Stavanger: sweet, but with a bite so sharp Vili fears he may cut his tongue if he isn’t careful. Not that _careful_ is something with which he often concerns himself—not here in Northumbria, surrounded by allies and friends of his father’s, gathered in equal parts remembrance and celebration—and especially not with Eivor.

No, he thinks with a grin that makes her _shout_ , hips bucking into his jaw, her fingers curling into his hair, tight enough that it’s almost painful. They moved past _careful_ years ago.

Her shout turns into a high keen that rends itself from a throat long hoarsened from a lifetime of barked commands and battle-cries. She is close, Vili knows. He’s learned much about her these past three nights: what she likes and what she does not. The shape of her slotting in so neatly around him, the feel of her thighs tightening around his waist the more he winds her up, the trails of kisses he plants night after night, from the hollow of her throat to the spot between her breasts where the skull of Hel sits inked above her sternum. And down further, now, where he moves his attention to the inside of her thigh. Soft. Slow. Teasing.

Eivor Varinsdottir is not a patient woman.

He delights in the stream of curses she lets out, the mumbled threats made half-incoherent by her desire. Three nights now, it has been like this: she comes to him, asking of him something he wants so badly to give—but he hesitates, and she waits, and they fall into one another. Carefully. Teasingly. Taking their time to explore, to learn each other’s rhythms. To stoke those embers that had never fully gone out.

Three nights now, and he is forgetting more and more just what it is that has made him so careful, so hesitant now where he had never been before.

Still, there is an upside to hesitance: Eivor’s threats are sweeter to him than any skald-song echoing through his father’s longhouse.

“Patience, Wolf-Kissed,” Vili murmurs, letting his breath brush ever so lightly over the slick of her lips. “The Christ-followers say it is a virtue.”

“I’ll show you fucking _virtue_ , Arse-Stick.” The tremor in her voice belies her growl. “When I’m through with you—”

He slides a finger in, thumb working steadily at her clit, and she cuts herself off with another strangled cry.

So close.

“Vili Hemmingson,” she grits out. “By the gods—if you do not finish this here and now—”

 _Fuck it_ , he decides as he moves back up, his hand still working down below as his teeth worry little love-bites into the soft of her belly, her breast, her favorite spot behind her ear. Kisses her deeply, thirstily, the taste of her still in his beard. They have lost too many years already. They are both ravenous as wolves.

She trembles, tight and slick around his fingers, and the heady scent is enough to drive him insane. His cock throbs and twitches and finally he pushes inside to where she is soft and oh so warm. Immediately she adjusts her hips, giving him room to bury himself in as deep as she can, they way they both like, and his still-slick hand grips her hipbone and he cannot help his own cry as she rolls up to meet him.

It doesn’t take long for him to spill into her, riding out the waves of her pleasure, his arms trembling with the effort it takes not to buckle and collapse right there on top of her. But she pulls him close as the climax fades, and he melts anyway, sprawling beside her with half-closed eyes, sweat-slick chest still heaving to catch his breath as she does the same.

The wash-basin sits at the foot of his bed, filled with once-warm water that has cooled in the time it’s taken him to tease out pleasure for both of them. He should reach for it, he knows, before they dry into a sticky mess; on the other hand, lying here in his bed, listening to nothing but the heartbeat and steadying breaths of Eivor in his arms, is just too fucking comfortable.

He presses a kiss into the crook of her shoulder. She lets out a happy little sigh, shifting closer to him.

Three nights since Hemming Jarl rode the pyre-smoke into Valhalla, and Vili doesn’t think he has ever felt so laid bare. So unmoored, and yet—with Eivor here—so at peace.

Here, in the same bed he has known since Hemming Jarl claimed Snotinghamscire half a lifetime ago, Vili Hemmingson can shut his eyes and convince himself that this is how it always is: that his mother and father are fast asleep in the jarl’s chambers across the longhouse. That he will wake in the morning to hear the clatter of Hemming and Trygve’s daily _orlog_ match, to smell the fresh-baked bread his mother used to insist on waking up to prepare before dawn. That Eivor wakes beside him not just once or thrice—

He could shut his eyes and convince himself of all of these things. Perhaps, even a few days ago, he would have done so happily, and lost himself in the world that could have been. A world so like this one, but free of the losses that still tug at his heart. But the more he tries, the less he finds that that is what he wants.

What he _actually_ wants—well.

Three nights Eivor has offered it to him. Two nights he has hesitated. This is the third night, and she will return to Mercia in the morning. She will not ask again.

Does she know, Vili wonders, exactly how much he left behind when his father uprooted their clan and sailed for England? Does she know how closely their fates had come to intertwining, the last time Hemming Jarl had set foot in Fornburg with his wife and only son?

Before he can talk himself out of doing so, he rises, ignoring Eivor’s languid protests. He wets a cloth in the wash-basin and squeezes out the excess water, then busies himself with cleaning up as best he can the mess they’ve made. There is nothing stopping him from telling her, but he doesn’t think he can find the words unless his mind is half-focused on some other task.

“You don’t have to do that.” Eivor sits up, places a hand over his as he wipes his come from between her thighs. Vili shakes his head—a tacit _no, but I want to_ that she understands as clearly as if he’d said it aloud.

“Do you remember,” he asks quietly as he rinses the cloth in the basin and starts again, “the last we saw of each other? Back in Norway, all those years ago?”

“Sigurd took me hunting that morning, so we missed your arrival,” Eivor says. “We were in the mountains all day, checking the hare-traps and chasing deer. We didn’t return to Fornburg until the sun had almost set. Styrbjorn served fresh venison to your family, a farewell feast for the ages. And you were gone at first light.”

“We didn’t only come to say goodbye,” Vili tells her.

“No?”

“No.” He sighs, sits back. Tosses the cloth back into the basin. Her eyes are blue and deep as summer seas lapping at the docks of Fornburg, and he cannot look away. “My father came to ask Styrbjorn to betroth you to me.”

“ _What?_ ”

“Styrbjorn refused, of course. Varin’s last act in this life was to pledge his clan to Styrbjorn’s, and Styrbjorn refused break that pact and send you away. Not again, not after everything you’d already lost. He loved you as his own. Raised you as his own. _Eivor Varinsdottir,_ he said, _will lead Sigurd’s war-band when he is jarl after me. She is nobody’s wife._ ”

“So when you asked, in the mountains, if I’d ever wondered what could have been—”

Vili smiles. “A thoughtless question, spilled from mead-loosened lips. I didn’t think Styrbjorn would have told you. Hemming and Styrbjorn parted on friendly terms the following morning, and it never came up again. But as I said: sometimes I wondered. I guess you did, too.”

Eivor holds his gaze for a long moment, still and inscrutable. Then she flops back onto the bed with a long sigh, staring at the ceiling beams. “He should have told me,” is all she says.

Vili raises an eyebrow. “Would you have answered any differently?”

“No,” she admits. “But should have been my decision to make.”

 _And where does that leave us now?_ Vili wants to ask. Because now she’s the one asking him to join her—to leave behind the life he’s known these twelve years, these halls still rife with the memories of his parents. Ravensthorpe enticed him when it was just a fantasy, something unattainable: a place he could visit in daydreams when the illness that had eaten so slowly at Hemming Jarl had been too much to bear. He could lie here and imagine a world in which all he held dear was close at hand: his parents, Trygve, the clan he loved but never wished to lead. Eivor, and the winding rivers of England, and the world beyond Northumbria.

“Three times you have asked me to join you, to fight by your side,” he says, lying down next to her. “Three night we have spent in each other’s company—not counting that night on the mountain, when you called us temporary. Called _this_ temporary.”

_What do you want from me, Eivor?_

He doesn’t have to ask it; the question hangs in the air between them, and she knows it already. She has always known. And that is problem, isn’t it? Their closeness is a comfort, a joy, a refuge. But it is also what keeps them apart, because they cannot hide their truths.

He cannot be a jarl.

She cannot be a wife.

“Your father wanted your happiness, Vili,” says Eivor. Her voice is soft, her usual rasp hardly audible in the quiet stillness. “He told me himself. Called you too headstrong to listen. He shaped Trygve into the jarl we have named him, because he knew that the wider world calls to you, as Styrbjorn knew it called to me.”

That doesn’t answer his unasked question.

“As for what _I_ want from you, if you are willing to give it,” Eivor continues, “is nothing more than what I’ve always wanted. I only want your companionship, Arse-Stick. As much as you are willing to give, and nothing more.”

“And if that’s too much?” Vili asks. “Or not enough? What happens if what I am prepared to give does not match what you are willing to receive?”

“A problem for another day,” she replies. She turns to face him, and the moonlight filtering through the high windows of his bedroom catches the Raven Clan tattoo on the side of her head. Freshly inked, he remembers, on the dawn of her sixteenth winter. She’d been giddy to show it to him, and even back then, young and stupid as they were, he’d known what it meant to her: acceptance, family. A place of belonging.

He had that, once, before his parents ascended into Odin’s hall. He wants it again.

The ink is faded now; the linework needs a touch-up—nothing her tattooist cannot fix, he’s sure. But the raven still stands dark and proud, signifying her status and alliance to all who behold her. Vili reaches out to trace the outline of its beak with a calloused thumb.

“You’re very sure of yourself, Wolf-Kissed,” he murmurs. “Always have been. Long as I’ve known you.”

Eivor grins. “You’ll find your footing again soon, Arse-Stick.”

He kisses her. Takes it slowly once more, only this time it is not teasing. He takes his time with it, so that he can be sure that she knows it is his way of saying: _Yes. Yes, I will join you. For as long as you’ll have me._

With Trygve Jarl’s blessing and well-wishes, Vili Hemmingson departs Hemthorpe at first light. Birna eyes him up and down as she moves aside to make room for him at the oars; Finnr claps him on the shoulder and laughs that he will not need such a heavy cloak, for they sail south into warmer waters soon.

Eivor takes her place at the helm, braids draped loosely over her shoulder as the sun shines warmly upon the longship. She barks an order, and they are off.

**Author's Note:**

> Not two hours after initially posting this, I load up ACV and start sailing around and what do I hear? Vili talking about how he never knew his mother. RIP to me, and this little inconsequential backstory I made up, I guess.


End file.
